Poem: 'Parlour Tricks' by Alan Lisanti

Parlour Tricks

by Alan Lisanti

The echo chamber

Where words bounce around like rubber bullets in a padded room

Deflections and ricochets

The curious thoughts and the odd paranoia

The fear-driven premature mortality obsession

Of death like it's always breathing cold exhalations on my neck

Remnants of anxious rush coincided with my restlessness

Everything is never quick enough between point a's and b's

Should it subside if I breathe

Control spun dizzy and distorted by the atrophy

It centers around the lack of maintained moments

Where I wonder how far the damage has blown my hollow bones in vicious winds

Where the tides of calm are always just the waters churned

Where the whitewalls and swells dip and dive in extreme descents

This surface never tranquil and still in the dawn's fresh Sun

Beneath the depths to which the eyes can see

There's madness in a maelstrom

Anchors that sink like teeth into the bottom sands

Dragged endlessly by concrete shoes and weighted feet

Like metal on asphault

Where friction erodes the efforts they make to stand firm in the trenches of

What's best described as

Aquatic life of gilled marine mammals

With liquid singed lungs

Adaption: where you become triumphant over evolution's time lapses in slowed hours like clock hands soaked in molasses

And strained by the ticks and tocks

Of duties fulfilled endlessly

To where the gears tire out

And the days have gone numb

Trudge your tomb shoes through the countryside's loneliness

Civilization is an escapists best fitted suit of armour against the throes of isolation and the birth of stirred insanity

The classic depreciation of functional awareness

Symptomatic side effects of hopeless castaways

The voice and the mind's voices concentrated into one

Like split atoms in reverse

Conjoinment by confinement

Madness and doubts and desperation

All in this chorus in unison

Voids and vacancies plugged like holes with the thinking man's thumb

Questionable methods and extortions of tendencies

Drown in the ideal survivalists atmosphere

The oxygen has betrayed me now too

Just like determination and love

When the world stands on my chest

Pressure that tips the scales towards collapse

All in my head and imaginary

And it begs the question

How far can this go?

The calm precedes the storm

The prologue of synergies in the rabbit holes

The loose wheels of the rocket ship built with aluminum

The tin can prayers of human moths flying towards compactors

The scorched wings of Icarus

The scars of all brave fools

And the consequences of tragedies

Where they have tried the unthinkable

And some not lived to transcend their foolish bravery

Catch a bullet in your teeth and spit it out for all the rainy days

Now you can be houdini playing frisbee with ninja stars

And make your exit in a cloudy puff of smoke

Trust me when I say that my demons are quarantined

Not running rampant like a stampede of hooves

But what might it cost me to come out the other side of this?

Altered or...forever

As one